In image writing this process has many illustrations running back to the cave drawings where the head or horns of an ox or goat are given instead of the whole animal. This convention was used over the whole Mediterranean region and apparently became the direct ancestor of the Hebrew aleph, the Greek alpha, and our modern English a. The letter a as now used in the alphabet appears to be the end of a long historical process of conventionalizing by which user after user has tried to simplify the strokes required more and more or, as the modern complacent “inventors” of the ancient principles which they now call “efficiency” would say, “reduce the motions required” until the present form has been reached.
In image writing too is more clearly seen the development of what may be called sample-and-number abbreviation.
The earliest way of representing several animals seems to have been the making several like symbols—one for each. Five oxen, e.g. are expressed by five pictures. It is entirely natural that when a man is writing the same picture several times, one after another, and knows that others will know it to be a repetition, the process of conventionalizing, which goes on so fast under ordinary circumstances, should go even faster, until pictures four and five become simple scrawls and in the course of time the whole is reduced to practically a single picture and four straight lines. Here we have the individual record and the sample record combined.
True picture writing is not very common on the ancient monuments and is chiefly to be studied in the primitive writings of uncivilized tribes such as the Bushmen and the North American Indians. There are, however, both in the Assyrian and Egyptian hieroglyphics many traces of the older pictures from which these are derived and the idea of the picture writing is seen in great fullness in the determinatives of the Egyptian writing, although it is likely that these are not so much remains as restorations. They consist, as is well known, of pictures which suggest something of the meaning of the word, e.g. all words related to writing are followed by the pictures of the scribe’s palette, with pen and ink moistener. This suggests at once that the word has something to do with writing. It is likely that the attaching of these to phonetic signs was the result of finding that there were so many words which had the same sounds.
A very simple example of picture writing is given in Hoffman (p. 95) with its explanation. A canoe with a torch in the bow, three bucks and a doe, the sign for a lake, and the picture of two wigwams tells the story of a hunting expedition by torchlight on the lake from which three bucks and a doe were brought back to the wigwam. A slightly more complex one is given in Figure 3, which is the record of a shaman’s curing of a sick man. A more complex one, given on page 26, with its explanation on pages 170-72, is the mnemonic song of an Ojibway medicine man.
One method of picture writing shows an action by several successive stages of the same act. This is most commonly a picture of corresponding gesture signs. The picture writing by successive pictures, showing successive stages of a story, is a favorite method in the modern German humorous illustrated papers, and has, of course, its perfect modern counterpart in the cinematograph.
Any collection of wampum belts, birch bark, calendar skins, blankets, or other picture writing records, is of course a picture library which has already begun to take on the distinct character of the modern library.
§ 16. Ideographic records
Ideograms are the mnemonic stage of image writing. They may be recognizable pictures but, if so, their meanings have no relation to the picture itself. The head of an ox, for example, when it stands for an ox is picture writing, but when it stands for divinity or for the sound “a” it is an ideogram. All hieroglyphic and alphabetic writing is, therefore, in a way ideographic, but we are accustomed to distinguish phonetic writing and to leave for ideograms proper only those pictures which appeal to eye rather than ear. Some people read even alphabetical printed words as ideograms—the word suggests its object directly without being translated into its sounds. Some, on the other hand, cannot read even to themselves without thinking in sounds or even moving the lips.
Ideographic records so shade into the picture writing or the pictorial image record on the one hand and into phonetic writing and the book form common and appropriate to phonetic writing on the other, that it is not easy to single out any examples of exclusive ideographic record collections, although of course such collections are entirely conceivable, and the earliest traces of Egyptian or Sumerian hieroglyphics seem to suggest the stage where documents were in ideograms of whole words, but at this stage ideogram and phonogram would be almost indistinguishable as it would be a subjective matter as to whether it suggested to any given individual a visual image directly or only indirectly, through an ear picture.